Within a decade of the death of its founder, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Empire—one of Asia’s richest and most formidable military powers—had vanished entirely, annexed by the British East India Company in 1849. This swift collapse has long been a subject of debate, with historians divided between those who blame toxic court factionalism and others who emphasize aggressive British expansionism. Through examination of court chronicles from the Empire, first-person accounts, and British residency dispatches, this paper reassesses the Empire’s final decade and its ultimate collapse. Following Ranjit Singh’s death, ferocious internal strife and a chain of violent succession crises hollowed out the Sikh state from within, turning its greatest asset, the Khalsa Army, into an uncontrollable kingmaker. Against the backdrop of the Russian-British “Great Game” of jockeying for power in Central Asia, British anxiety grew that the Sikh Empire could no longer act as a reliable buffer state on their northwest frontier. Simultaneously, the arrival of more aggressive British administrators like Lord Dalhousie, guided by Orientalist views of Sikhs as brave soldiers but incapable rulers, shifted imperial policy from strategic partnership to active annexation. The paper argues that the destructive synergy between the internal instability of the Empire and the evolving imperial ambitions of British personnel on the ground caused the Sikh Empire’s downfall, providing a nuanced understanding of the fragility of personality-based regimes in the face of powerful outside empires and racialized ideology.